Washington Weenie Wings
by byrhthelm
Summary: Old faces and bad memories lead to a surprising finish


**Washington Weenie Wings  
by  
byrhthelm**

**A/N: **This story takes place a few weeks after _Dancing in DC_, but still before _Oops!_ Beth Hawkes is still on her Op Con Training at Oceana, and Harmon Rabb is still partnered with Megan Austin.

If you think I've taken liberties with the story and the time-line, you're right. But remember Harm is presenting the story as he saw it, and has censored some of the nastier bits in order to protect Beth.

**xxxxxxxxxx**

**Harmon Rabb's Apartment  
224B 8th Street  
Washington DC**

Lieutenant Beth Hawkes knew it was on the cards. That one weekend. sooner or later, she'd make the trip up to DC from Oceana only to find a note on the breakfast bar,

_Hey, Sweetheart,  
Am out of town. Onboard investigation with Meg on the Seahawk, somewhere in the Med. Not sure when we'll be back. Make yourself at home, but no wild parties while I'm gone!  
Love  
Harm_

"No, no wild parties while you're gone, Harm," she had murmured with a smile on her lips, "That'll have to wait 'til you get back!"

That had been last night, Friday, when she'd parked her ride outside and climbed the stairs to the apartment. She missed him, of course she did, the Operational Conversion Course at Oceana was gruelling and demanding, and she had gotten into the habit of working hard during the day and studying hard during the evening – except at the weekends. Those slightly less than forty eight hours she spent each week with Harm in DC kept her going through the training, and although she knew it was going to happen at some stage, she couldn't help but feel deflated.

Still an all day shopping outing to some of the DC Malls had lifted her spirits. She hadn't bought much, she couldn't afford to splash out unnecessarily on a Lieutenant's pay, but the few items she had bought and just looking at items she hadn't bought had raised her spirits to a marked degree – but, she still wished Harm was here...

But he wasn't here, and she would do herself no good moping around the apartment, although she wished, not for the first time, that Harm owned a TV. She shook her head, she knew that he said he frequently brought work home with him, and that he had his guitar for when he wasn't working, and he'd even proudly shown her his 'library' a single shelf with a dozen or so battered paperbacks on it.

True, he was also still working on bringing the apartment up to standard, and she was definitely impressed with the progress he'd made over the last month. But she still couldn't help wondering what he did during his down time in the evenings.

Now she'd grabbed a shower and was contemplating dinner. Beth was the first to acknowledge that she was no cook, and the truth to tell, the professional quality gas range Harm had installed in the kitchen area of the apartment intimidated her, but she figured she could open a can with the best of them and how difficult could it be to warm up a pan of canned chilli con carne, and slice open a couple of bread rolls? So, stood over the pan, a wooden spoon in her hand, barefooted and dressed only in her panties and one of Harm's plaid flannel shirts – she loved wearing his shirts, they smelled so very much of him; a clean, masculine scent mixed with smell of the Irish Spring soap he favoured, that was so very comforting - and mindful of the need not to let the food burn and stick to the bottom of the pan, she stirred the contents of the pan and was so absorbed in her task that the sound of the door opening and closing behind her didn't register for a few seconds.

Harm leaned back against the door, enjoying the sight that Beth afforded him, the tails of his shirt were plenty long enough to preserve her modesty, reaching further down her legs than the skirts he had seen on some of the young women around DC and in La Jolla, but for some reason the sight of her bare, tanned legs disappearing under the tail of his shirt struck him as highly erotic.

He wasn't left to admire for more than a few seconds as she suddenly spun to face him, and after a fleeting expression of surprise swept across her face, it split in a huge grin and she dropped the spoon and flew across the room towards him, jumping up at him, clasping her hands around the back of his neck to draw his face down to hers and at the same time swinging her legs up to lock her ankles behind him.

She devoured his face with kisses, witch he returned with as much enthusiasm until her weight threatened to over balance him at just about the same tine as she felt something hard and sharp against her right breast.

"Whoa, easy Tiger!" he joked as she let her legs drop so that she stood on her own two feet.

"Hey, what can I say?" she grinned up at him, her hands still clasped at the back of his neck, "I missed you. That's a hell of a big bed when you're not in it!"

"Well... if you're going to welcome me home like that every time. Maybe I ought to be pressing Commander Lindsey for more investigations to keep me out of town more often!"

"Don't even think about it, shyster!" she scolded him as she stepped back hands on hips, and glaring at him in pretended anger. Then her eyes fell on what had jabbed her breast and she gasped, her eyes widening, "Harm! Wings! You... you... you're wearing your wings!"

"Uh... yeah..." Harm looked slightly sheepish and self-consciously brought his hand up to cover the gold emblem that marked him as a naval aviator.

"Don't you dare take them off!" Beth warned him as she misinterpreted his intention.

"No... no... I'm not going to take them off. Never again," Harm assured her.

"But how... why... you said.. you didn't...Oooh! I smell a story here..."

"That may be so!" Harm agreed, as he side stepped past the petite brunette, "But I smell something burning!" he finished as he reached the range and turned the burner off, and grinned to himself as he heard Beth's _sotto voce_ comment.

"Oh crap! I forgot!" and then louder and defensively, "Anyway it's entirely your fault for distracting me!"

"Nope! Not going to work! I heard the 'I forgot' bit first," Harm laughed and then peered into the pan, "What was it anyway?"

"Chilli con carne," Beth replied looking slightly embarrassed, and then as she saw Harm's eyebrow start to rise she quickly added "Out of a can!"

"H'mm... well... it might have been dead cow before, but now it's just dead!" Harm observed as he scraped what he could out of the pan into the garbage disposal before he added liquid detergent to the burnt residue and topped it up with hot water before leaving it in the sink to soak.

"Oh, never mind that!" Beth said impatiently, "What about your wings?"

"Oh they can wait..." Harm said carelessly, deliberately teasing her, "Until I've had a shower and something to eat. Uh... there is something else to eat in the house, right?"

"Umm... no, not really" Beth confessed, "but there's a six pack of beer cooling in the fridge," she said hopefully.

"Oh... OK then, go ahead and phone for a pizza while l shower and change, and then once we've eaten I _will_ tell you why I'm wearing my wings."

"You drive a hard bargain, shyster!" Beth growled eyeing him with disfavour.

"Hey, what can I say?" Harm laughed over his shoulder as he made for the bedroom, "It's what I do!"

**xxxxxxxxxx**

"Well?" Beth demanded nearly an hour later as she crumpled up the now empty pizza box and the wad of kitchen towel before throwing them into the trash.

"Well what?" Harm asked asked from the couch, where he had just sat down and was twisting the caps off two bottles of beer.

"Well what about your wings?" Beth demanded sitting alongside him.

Harm raised his arm to loop it around her shoulders. Lifted his beer and said, "Cheers!"

"I'd drink to your health," Beth said in reply, "except that if you don't give with the story, then you aren't going to have any!" she added darkly, resisting the temptation to snuggle in to his chest.

"Yeah..." Harm said pausing to take a sip from his beer, "It's kinda complicated... You hear some scuttlebutt at Oceana about two splashed Mig 21s?"

"Yeah..." Beth said slowly.

"Well... the RIO involved in the incident was a Lieutenant Angela Arutti. The first female RIO to be involved in a successful air combat. The PA department were all over the story, and by the time we got to the Seahawk there was a ZNN news-crew aboard. A guy named Chuck de Palma and his cameraman."

"OK... but what has that got do with you and Meg, was there something hinky about the combat, did someone break the ROE?"

"No, nothing like that. Arutti's driver was the CAG, Captain Boone. Who was my Dad's best friend and wing-man and incidentally, also my Godfather. Not that you'd have thought so from the reception he gave me, he was pretty hostile!"

"Oh, why?"

"Don't know, not for sure. Maybe because he felt guilty about not flying a pattern over Dad's crash site until SAR arrived, maybe because he blamed me for letting Dad down when I crashed that F-14... maybe a combination of both."

Beth nodded as she took a pull of her beer. Harm's ramp strike and the death of his RIO was a sensitive subject, one he hated to talk about, and something for which he still blamed himself, despite Beth trying to explain that he hadn't crashed the jet, his RIO had panicked and ejected them from the Tomcat, leaving it nowhere to go except into the deck. But... giving a mental shrug, she said quietly, Go on..."

"I never figured Tom Boone for a Neanderthal, and even if he was, I thought he'd have known better than to let his opinion become public knowledge after Tailhook... I can't believe that we've still got people like that in the aviation community. It appears he deliberately gave Arutti a hard time while they were flying, to the extent that he deliberately took on the two Migs alone at close range, with guns, to find out whether Arutti had the 'guts for a knife fight'. He told her afterwards that in his opinion she didn't."

Berth wrinkled her brow. She didn't much like what Harm was telling her about the CAG, but..."I still don't see what that had to do with your onboard investigation," she objected. "If the shoot was good, within the ROE..."

"No... that all happened before the need for the investigation." Harm drew a deep breath. "The morning after the incident, Lieutenant Arutti was reported missing by her bunk mate. Her bunk hadn't been slept in. A search of the ship was negative. It was then assumed that sometime during the night, during rough weather, Lieutenant Arutti had gone overboard."

Harm felt Beth give a convulsive shudder. He didn't blame her. He too had felt much the same when he'd been told that the young RIO must have gone overboard.

They sat in silence for a few moments before Beth prompted him, "Well, go on..."

"There was a difference of opinion as to what had happened to her. One school of thought held that it was a rough night, dark, wet, windy with a pitching deck, and that somehow she'd accidentally gone over the side."

"And the other school?" Beth asked.

"It seems that the Lieutenant was having a hard time in the aftermath of the combat, and what the CAG had said to her about her lacking guts. She'd typed up a letter of resignation on her computer before she'd gone for a walk around the deck, so the other opinion was that she couldn't take the strain and had jumped."

Beth shuddered again. "Oh, Harm... that's horrible!" she cried.

"Yeah..." he breathed. "But that wasn't it."

Beth craned her head around to see into Harm's eyes and the shadow that she saw there almost made her wish that she hadn't. "It gets worse doesn't it?"

Harm nodded, "I mentioned her bunk-mate, a pilot, female of course, call sign Lobo, who had a distinctive wolf's head painted on the back of an old leather flight jacket. Did I mention that Arutti was blonde?"

Beth shook her head.

"So was Lobo. But Lobo was also into working out, specifically body building she had some pretty impressive muscles..." Harm said.

Beth thought about challenging Harm as to just how he knew about the other woman's muscles, but decided on letting the question slide – for the moment.

"Apparently, the CAG wasn't the only one with an attitude towards women aviators and flight officers. Another pilot and sometime LSO took intolerance to a whole new higher level. He hated that Lobo was apparently a better flyer than he, and he took delight when he was on the platform in waving her off, time after time, trying to undermine her confidence, pretty much as the CAG was doing to Arutti. Anyway, this pilot... he always came up with a plausible excuse – at least in the CAG's eyes – for doing that. I figure he was working on getting her grounded. But he also fancied himself as a muscle man, and apparently he and Lobo had an ongoing competition to see who could bench press the most. On the day of the combat, they had another round and at the end of it she was three for zero, and three bottles of scotch up. Turns out that he was real sore loser. Anyway, it turns out that when Arutti went for her walk around the deck, she borrowed Lobo's flight jacket, he saw the jacket and the blonde hair and thought it was Lobo, attacked her and threw her overboard.

"Oh, God!" Beth gasped.

"Yeah, not a pretty way to go. Of course we didn't know any of this until Arutti got caught up in some Italian fisherman's net and the body, still in the flight jacket, was turned over to the ME at Naples. Things fell into place pretty quickly after that. The pilot slash LSO was arrested and put on the next COD to Naples, where he'll face a court martial for murder."

You'll be going back to prosecute?" Beth asked.

Harm shook his head, "Nope, there's a standing prosecutor out there attached to the CINCMED SJA's office, a Commander Alison Krennick. A real barracuda from what I hear."

"OK... that was the investigation, but you're still not telling me why you decided to wear your wings again!"

"Umm... yeah... Arutti wasn't the only one getting a hard time. One of the pilots in the same squadron was Jack Mace, we'd flown together and his brother was my RIO. Mace still had hard feelings about the ramp strike, and when he saw I was on board he took great delight in proclaiming that I was a washed out failed pilot, who had screwed the pooch big time, and had no place on board a carrier in any capacity. As I said, I never wore my wings at JAG so I wouldn't have to keep explaining why I wasn't flying any more, but of course with Mace beating his gums, I was getting weird looks and questions from practically everybody, including Meg, who read me the riot act for keeping secrets from her. It wasn't the best two days of my life!"

Beth winced, "No... I can't imagine!"

Yeah, well it was pretty painful... You also remember I told you there was a ZNN crew aboard?" Harm continued, rapidly steering the subject away from the humiliation he'd felt, and the savage enjoyment Mace took from his predicament.

"Well that was because Arutti was the first female RIO in a successful air combat. Seems that word flashed back all the way to DC and there was interest at the White House, even. Well, her sudden disappearance, and suspected suicide was big news, and I... uh... bribed de Palma to sit on the story for twenty four hours while Meg and I investigated."

Despite the sombre effect the story do far had had on Beth, she couldn't help a little chuckle, "What did you bribe him with?"

"Oh, just a couple of rides in a Tomcat," Harm said casually.

"Harm! But... you didn't have the authority to do that... did you?"

"Nope, and I had to do some pretty slick talking to get the CAG to OK it. I figure he saw the need to back-pedal a bit on his attitude after the arrest, and play nice. Any way, he OK'd the rides and he even took de Palma up in a twin control F-14 that morning. As far as I can figure it out, he turned the heating right up to max in the rear cockpit, and then pulled a lot of high G turns, rolls and loops... you know how that goes..." Harm finished with a reluctant grin.

"Yeah... I know!" Beth said with feeling. She like the other two female RIOs on her NFO course had been subjected to the same dirty trick.

"Anyway, when the CAG offered the second ride to de Palma, he refused, and I sort of... well... I volunteered myself. Hell, I almost begged for the ride!" Harm confessed with a small grin.

"So I got suited up, went through the safety briefing, but by the time I got onto the flight deck, something had changed and Command was calling for an Alpha Strike. The CAG had volunteered us for the ATARS mission... so off we went.

"It was a dark when we got to the target area and there was pretty heavy triple A, really lit up the sky, but we flew the mission all right, the fire didn't seem to be coordinated, but on the way back some Serb gunner got lucky and we were hit, I was OK, but the CAG took a hit to the head and was unconscious. Anyway I took control – I did say it was a dual control bird, right?"

Beth nodded.

"Anyway, when we got back to the Seahawk, Fly-Pry recommended we eject and let the bird go down, but I wasn't sure the CAG would survive an ejection. He still hadn't come round, and I thought I could see blood coming from under his helmet. So..." Harm took a deep breath.

"I convinced Fly-Pri to let me make the trap..."

"Harm your eyes!

"Yeah, well it wasn't that bad," Harm shrugged, "I caught the number three wire and that was that..."

"But your wings?" Beth persisted.

"Oh, yeah... well... the next morning Meg and I were on the way to the COD. Jack Mace and a few of the other guys from the squadron were on deck, waiting for us. Mace started coming on to Meg a bit, and I was about to get into his face, when he stopped what he was saying, took his own wings off and pinned them on me. Said it didn't matter that I was a Washington Weenie, I was still an Aviator!"

"Oh, Harm!" Beth gasped.

"Yeah. I don't know if we're friends now, but we don't seem to be enemies any more!"

Beth sat in silence for a few moments and then with an air of decision she drained the last mouthful of her beer, slipped out from Harms side and standing, extended her hand to him, "Come on then, now you've got your wings back, fly me to the moon... Flyboy!"

Harm smiled up at her, "Aye, aye, ma'am!"

**xxxxxxxxxx**

**The End**


End file.
